Politics, Development, Language.

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No weekly highlight for last week, because Fanon’s Wretched of The Earth was a reading, and how can anyone else compete with that? It’s just not fair.

So, this week it was Robert Heilbroner with The Worldly Philosophers, a book which has sold over 2 million copies which is incredible when you consider that it’s a history of economic thought. Lots of required readings for undergraduate courses I suspect, because this is very accessible, but it’s also just very good. Flew through the chapter on Marx without even noticing it; all throughout it he manages to explain Marx’s ideas more lucidly than just about anyone else (and definitely more clearly than “that angry genius, Karl Marx” as Heilbroner lovingly calls him). Ideas interwoven with biography and cool factoids (e.g.: apparently when Engels came to visit Marx in London on the occasion that constituted their first proper meeting, their conversation lasted for ten days).

One point I found interesting concerned Marx’s legacy for the kind of intellectual climate on the political left.